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Commit 48d02a1d authored by Andi Kleen's avatar Andi Kleen Committed by Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo
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perf script: Add 'brstackinsn' for branch stacks



Implement printing instruction sequences as hex dump for branch stacks.

This relies on the x86 instruction decoder used by the PT decoder to
find the lengths of instructions to dump them individually.

This is good enough for pattern matching.

This allows to study hot paths for individual samples, together with
branch misprediction and cycle count / IPC information if available (on
Skylake systems).

  % perf record -b ...
  % perf script -F brstackinsn
  ...
    read_hpet+67:
          ffffffff9905b843        insn: 74 ea                     # PRED
          ffffffff9905b82f        insn: 85 c9
          ffffffff9905b831        insn: 74 12
          ffffffff9905b833        insn: f3 90
          ffffffff9905b835        insn: 48 8b 0f
          ffffffff9905b838        insn: 48 89 ca
          ffffffff9905b83b        insn: 48 c1 ea 20
          ffffffff9905b83f        insn: 39 f2
          ffffffff9905b841        insn: 89 d0
          ffffffff9905b843        insn: 74 ea                     # PRED

Only works when no special branch filters are specified.

Occasionally the path does not reach up to the sample IP, as the LBRs
may be frozen before executing a final jump. In this case we print a
special message.

The instruction dumper piggy backs on the existing infrastructure from
the IP PT decoder.

An earlier iteration of this patch relied on a disassembler, but this
version only uses the existing instruction decoder.

Committer note:

Added hint about how to get suitable perf.data files for use with
'-F brstackinsm':

  $ perf record usleep 1
  [ perf record: Woken up 1 times to write data ]
  [ perf record: Captured and wrote 0.018 MB perf.data (8 samples) ]
  $
  $ perf script -F brstackinsn
  Display of branch stack assembler requested, but non all-branch filter set
  Hint: run 'perf record -b ...'
  $

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Tested-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@kernel.org>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170223234634.583-1-andi@firstfloor.org


Signed-off-by: default avatarArnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
parent 74beb09a
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